My flight to New York leaves tomorrow morning at 6:40. You know I sat in front of my monitor for four hours in disbelief when it came time to book it, hitting refresh every ten seconds, waiting for the 9am departure / noon arrival flight to miraculously appear but it never did. So now I get to wake up at, what, three? I don't even know. I don't handle mornings gracefully. I need to know how much Benadryl I can take to rack out at 6:30 tonight without dying. I must have missed that day at Science Camp for Failures.
I just painted my toenails for the first time in a year and halfway through I gave up and just started painting my whole toe. I hope there's a loophole in the "everlast topcoat" clause somewhere or else I might never be able to bend my toes again.
When I get back into town I'm going to have to make an appointment with Honda's service department because I can't figure out how to lock the door from inside the car. Here's how I expect that conversation to roll:
"Yeah, I can't figure out how to lock the door from inside the car." "Are... are you serious? "No. Forget it, I was just joking."
I need to pull out the manual, I guess, which on some level disgusts me. It's a DOOR LOCK, how hard can this possibly be? I stop at gas stations or the bank or the Safeway and I'm sure I look like an idiot, sitting as I am with my feet in the parking lot, carefully examining the entire car door and jam for some secret hidden lever or knob or something. Maybe I just wave my hand in front of the handle and it locks itself, like an automated toilet. I can remember when the height of technology was Natalie Cole making that CD with her dead father, I think it's safe to say we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, here. Let's start LEAVING SOME SHIT ALONE, HOW BOUT.
¶ posted by Erin on Saturday, August 30, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Cringe!
When I told my mom on the phone yesterday that I'm going to New York to help Sarah celebrate the long-awaited release of the truly amazing Cringe book, her response was immediate:
"Oh, God," she said, "is your part about me?"
"No," I told her. And I figured I might as well go ahead and tell her what "my part" is actually about because really, it's either spit it out now on the phone or wait until she reads it in my own ridiculous eighth-grade handwriting. "It's part of a sexual fantasy I wrote about William."
You remember William, your married friend? Who was and will always be twenty-five years older than I am?
"Wait, what?"
"A sexual fantasy I wrote in the third-person."
I couldn't tell then if she was laughing or barking or throwing up. Maybe a combination.
"When I pick a fetish I really commit to it," I said.
Mom could barely respond. "What fetish?" she wheezed. "Potentially homosexual sailors? With... with poodles?"
Oh, right. The poodles. I'd forgotten about the poodles.
"I actually meant older men, Mom."
"Well, yeah, that," she said, sobering up.
Betsy and Trixie. Those were the poodles. Fuck.
Anyway. I'm going to be in New York starting Sunday. Email me if you want to buy me a drink. Just kidding, you don't have to buy me a drink. We could just go jogging or to mass or something instead. I'm going to be hanging out with my awesome friend Danielle who's already assured me that if we happen to hook up with some internet serial killer, she'll find a reason to peace out and give us some privacy. What's the equivalent of "cock block" for serial killers? How about "knife block". She wouldn't want to knife block me. True friend, right there.
¶ posted by Erin on Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
They have a landscaping service, so I'll have to get up early.
Randy and I went to Crate & Barrel yesterday afternoon because we bought eight drinking glasses there a year ago and sometime between then and now we've managed to destroy six of them. I remember personally dropping one on the kitchen floor, but that's it, that's the extent of my culpability. I thus have no choice but to assume Randy made the other five explode with his uncontrollable mind powers a la Firestarter. Because I know for damn sure he didn't slam his giant destructive man knee into the coffee table five different times. I'd remember all that eye rolling.
I haven't been in too much of a hurry to replace our psychically exploded glassware since I tend to tackle most of my liquid consumption from one of two receptacles: my Little Ass Lady's Glass or Big Cup.
The Little Ass Lady's Glass came from a bar on the ASU campus called the Timber Wolf. Timber Wolf was one of those bars that doubles as a dare; they had seventeen thousand beers on tap, and if you somehow managed to slog all the way through the suds roster, you were handsomely rewarded with a 3" by 5" personalized plaque on the ceiling. And probably divorce papers. The bar managed to look shockingly like a 1800s bayou fishing shanty and was, I maintain, constructed entirely out of balsa wood.
I was one-third of the way through the beer list when someone pulled the trigger to turn Timber Wolf into the parking permit administrative office. One of the worst decisions ASU has made, frankly, not only because of my own personal stake in the business, but also because I can't even begin to fathom how sober people can operate inside that structure on a day-to-day basis. The building is held together solely with gellified Thai ale and it smells like a hungover sewer. I only wish I had strapped giant balsa wings onto that fucker and hooked it up to a rubberband slingshot before it was official university property.
Big Cup is a jumbo plastic cup I stole from Zipp's, a sports bar roughly one point three miles from my house. I was sitting at the bar, the Arizona State game having long since ended, when I decided, slump shouldered, we should all just walk home. If we got tired along the way we could stop and sleep in some random but doubtlessly beneficent stranger's front yard-- and I was genuinely excited about this part, about cashing out on some dude's sprinkler-dewy front lawn at three in the morning, cherub hands folded under asshole head, only to wake up to said dude's automatic garage door fifteen minutes before Motorola roll call-- and if Randy hadn't pried the wine/martini/shot glass out of my hands and replaced it with this giant plastic water goblet right before he called a cab, I probably wouldn't be here right now, I'd still be backpacking all over suburban south Tempe. Avoiding loitering warrants. Eating out of the local Whole Foods dumpster. Okay, not the dumpster, probably still the deli. But I wouldn't be hogging a four-top table all by myself like the housebound Erin of yore, that's for goddamn sure. But Randy did call a cab and I ended up sleeping in my own bed that night, Big Cup clenched in my wannabe hobo fists; a plastic testament to my inner backpacking, lawn sleeping, Whole Foods table sacrificing, suburban tramping ASU football fan. I like having Big Cup around. Big Cup reminds me that there's always time to stop and drink some water. And that sometimes you can straight up steal a cup and no one will say anything if you just shut the fuck up about sleeping in the parking lot.
So anyway. We bought six replacement glasses yesterday. Not one of which is personally meaningful or symbolic of anything at all. To fix this I'm thinking I'll drive three of them down to ASU and fill them up with some lager that was brewed in a casket while trying in vain to buy a parking pass for Structure B, and the other three I'll cuddle for warmth while I'm sleeping on the lawn of the people who live across the street.
Who, incidentally, don't really seem to like me.
¶ posted by Erin on Monday, August 25, 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Backfire.
I signed up for Twitter again. I had an account last year sometime but I was a genius and signed up under my full name with public updates; a month later I found fifteen pages of my nonsensical tweets lodged in Google's cache with everything but my social security number as a reference. I don't know why I was surprised, I know how the internet likes to hoard shit. I've gone to great lengths to keep this site from being indexed in the search engines and other bullshit directories, it stands to reason I'd have to do the same thing with Twitter.
I genuinely like the application, though, so I signed up again-- only omitting my last name and making my updates private. Here's hoping the Google bots don't catch on. Keep on walking, Google. Nothing to see here.
Randy got tickets to see Tom Petty in concert tonight. I like Tom Petty well enough, but it's hard to pass up an excuse to make fun of Randy's jump start on age.
"Who's opening?" I asked last night. "Buddy Holly?"
"I'm looking."
"The Beach Boys? Wait, who was that guy in the PBS special you made me watch the other night? Roy Orbison! Is it Roy Orbison? Roy Orbison and The Bison Orbs?"
And then I crammed some potato chips in my mouth real fast because I fucking LOVE Steve Winwood.
¶ posted by Erin on Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Monday, August 18, 2008
He's a smallish dragon.
When I moved in with Randy sixteen thousand years ago, he came fully equipped with a complete set of Mikasa dishware. It was in his trousseau. Right next to a set of monogrammed tea towels and a lifetime subscription to Maxim.
This pattern, I don't know what the actual name is; I might have known at one time but I call it so many other things under my breath that I've long since forgotten. I've harbored a soul crushing hatred for these dishes for many, many years. I can see how a person could look at the picture to the left and be confused: "But why?" that person might ask. "That's a perfectly respectable bowl, right there. A little fruit, a little color... some people don't even have dishes, my uncle in Des Moines, for example, his wife left him and he's been eating canned chili off an old car floormat for three years."
And I agree. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the bowl to the left. What happens, apparently-- and this was news to me as I'd never actually owned a set of dishes from the Paleozoic era before-- is that the more these dishes roll through the dishwasher, the more their smooth enamel coating erodes away. And as that sealant is rubbed off, the more eating out of this bowl becomes shockingly like eating out of a concaved piece of chalkboard. Plates, mugs, bowls, you name it, they're all fucked up. And they've all made mealtime an experiment in terror. We could have James Bond over for tea and cake and he, bamboo shoots still lodged nonchalantly under his fingernails, would drag his fork across our Mikasa dessert plate exactly one time before breaking down into tears and drawing us a map to the safehouse.
Not to mention the fact that without the sealant our dishes are vulnerable to the elements; we toss our unsealed plates in the dishwasher and they come out covered in burn marks, brown spots etched into the chalkboard. It's like a dragon came and breathed all over our stuff. Add to all this the fact that Randy is both a dropper and a thing knocker overer, and you can safely assume that every single piece of this crap that we own is also chipped beyond any call of reason.
The dishes need to go. They needed to go five years ago. But despite my inherent toddler instincts, I've somehow managed to avoid smashing everything with a hammer in light of the rational fact that we really do own an absolute storage tanker of this crap. Whenever I bring it up to Randy (every hour on the quarter hour) he raises his arms up as if to encompass the entire house and says, "But we have the whole set!" To a ridiculous degree, yes. Every salad plate, saucer, mug, bowl, smaller bowl, chip and salsa tray, serving bowl, butter dish, casserole, salt and pepper shaker, maple syrup caddy, fucking mortar and pestle... yeah. I have to concede-- if sheer quantity is a deciding factor, I lose.
Of course the reality is that I'm so blinded by the thirteen pasta serving bowls that I forget we only have five dinner plates, right, and then inevitably we get a sixth person over for a meal and he's forced to eat dinner off four saucers and a gravy boat.
"So we'll buy replacements!" Randy always says. "They still make this pattern!"
Not a selling point, baby. They still make cannonballs, too, but that doesn't mean the Army hasn't upgraded.
Be all of this as it may, I haven't ever made a serious play for replacement. Randy calls this "choosing my battles". I call it "abject apathy". It's much easier to just bitch continuously from the couch than it is to actually find and buy another set. I can just see that scenario unfolding now; I choose the new set of dishes only to hear nonstop about how shallow the bowls are and how the plates are too small and that the sugar bowl didn't come with a matching spoon. Yeah, I don't think so. There's only room for one dish martyr in this house and I'm it. I'll eat off burned chalkboard saucers for the rest of my life, buddy, I've got a masters degree in pitiful resignation.
So that's where we've been for the last, oh, thirteen thousand years. But then last month my grandmother passed away. And she left me her entire dish set. Or rather, she left me ONE of her entire dish sets; she left the other entire dish set to my sweetheart sister-in-law. The set she gave me was the set she and my grandfather used everyday for thirty years and it's gorgeous. I've always loved it. It's Royal Worcester and very delicate, white and smooth, gold-rimmed. With fruits.
"Fruits!" I told Randy, waiting for it to arrive on the truck. "Just like the old set! Only I don't completely despise it."
He looked at me warily.
"And all the serving pieces," I said, "more than we have now, even."
He looked at me still. Warily still.
"You can keep your little salsa bowl thing," I conceded. The Worcester might not be equipped for salsa. "I really want to use this set of dishes, Randy. They were my grandmother's and they're beautiful and it's important to me."
"Then we'll use them," he said. "Absolutely. It's important to you, so I'm choosing my battles, here."
That worked out well, I told him, because I had made up my mind to choose my battles, too, and if it came down to it I was prepared to throw the entire Mikasa Collection into the driveway. Which would have been a huge pain in the ass, what with having to hire a professional to come and doze a path through the mountain of fruity chalkboard shards to the garage.
"You should call Karen," Randy said, referring to a neighbor of ours who has the same Mikasa pattern we have, "and see if she wants any of these pieces before we donate them."
I don't know about that idea, frankly. It could go one of two ways. One: Karen happily sorts through our dishware, gratefully selecting three or four pieces she wasn't aware Mikasa ever made, or two: A horrified Karen sorts through our chipped and cracked dishware, appalled at our inability to not wreck nice things, and then bolts for the door with her head down before the dragon can emerge from the cabinet and set her hair on fire.
¶ posted by Erin on Monday, August 18, 2008
Monday, August 11, 2008
Trunkt!
I was accepted into Trunkt this morning and I'm pretty excited about it.
My brother and his family moved last weekend so now instead of living fifty minutes away they live four minutes away. We’re all ecstatic about this, as you would expect, and everyone pitched in to help with the move in some way. For example, I volunteered to camp inside my house all weekend with the lights off while avoiding the ringing telephone. I’m still waiting for my thank you basket.
So when my brother called me yesterday and asked if I could watch his two-year-old son for a few hours today, I said yes. Not only did I owe him a favor, but the timing was perfect; I just got the whole box set of Night Court on DVD. And that ten thousand piece jigsaw puzzle of a solid brick wall isn’t going to put itself together. Note to self: open a daycare.
In truth I jump at the chance to watch the baby. He’s wonderfully sweet and smart and chill, just a total pleasure to be around.
It seems as though I may have inadvertently gotten him addicted to gambling which could turn into a problem down the road, I guess, but I'll give him this, the kid's got pretty good instincts. And he didn't seem to like the cigars, so it's not all bad news.
His favorite thing to do at our house (when he's not rolling dice, obviously) is to clamber around on top of the pool table. A year ago I couldn't see the harm in it-- I mean, aside from falling off the table, crashing his tiny head into a low-hanging lamp, or crushing his little baby fingers with one of sixteen violently rolling pool balls, what could possibly go wrong? But now he's bigger and more mobile, meaning he'll fall harder, skull slam more lamps, and roll the balls harder into his own nicotine-stained fingers. So I told him no.
And he accepted that pretty gracefully, I thought. He nodded, walking around and around the table, assessing, looking for a way. Mentally working out the physics. Calculating the odds of catastrophic mishap. He was pretty hilarious, up on his little thong sandal tippy toes, and I knelt down next to him to get a photo. At which point he attacked me like a howler monkey, scrambled up my body and sprung off the top of my head to achieve a mighty victory.
He was up there for hours. We came to an oft-repeated "stay on your bottom" compromise which at least kept him from tap dancing. Eventually he rolled himself into exhaustion and racked out right there on the felt. I told my brother when he came to pick him up, hey man, if he has trouble sleeping at home, just put him on top of something really high and made out of hardwood and set some rocks within arm's length. He'll be out like a light.
ME: I was just going to.. it’s funny, we were talking a few days ago: it’s such an interesting idea to write a history about a piece of land, and I was curious whether it would be more of a technical undertaking wherein we would just sort of talk about the land itself and how it relates to the growth of the city as a whole, or whether it would be more quote/unquote “romantic” and deal more with the families who lived there and, you know, worked that land and their strides and successes and it sounds like it’s going to be a really fantastic combination of those two things. I think we established the parameters of the property that we’re talking about but in terms of a time frame… I understand that it’s not going to focus on you gentlemen or your families, but in a sense it will if only because it will be coming from your point of view. You will be intimately involved in that respect. How far back are we going to go, when is this history going to start? You gentlemen, obviously your families know each other quite well, so I’d like to get a sense of whose family was there first and then how you came to know one another and one another’s families. Does that make sense?
I generally walk around town thinking I’m an adequate typist. You know? I mean, I can’t do it all fancy like you fancy cats in keyboard college with your definitive hand placement and your brown tuxedos and bolo ties and everything, fingers all unnaturally spaced out like you’re gearing up to play some ragtime, but I can make words appear fairly quickly with only a modicum of backspacing and/or looking down at my hands.
Well, evidently I’ve never been called upon to transcribe anything. I think I would remember this fiery migraine, this vast sense of total incompetence, and this uncontrollable urge to pick nits out of my offspring’s fur. I’ve got hours and hours of interview meetings on a digital recorder that need to somehow evolve into a Word document and I can conceive of no viable plan to make that happen. I’ve tried setting the recorder on top of the computer and leaving them alone together for a while, I’ve tried pushing play on the recorder and hushing the computer to listen, I’ve typed “transcription by telepathy” into Microsoft Word Help… all for nothing.
It’s been slowly dawning on me all day—much as I imagine it dawned on Sigourney Weaver that her spaceship escape pod was carrying a giant slimy stow-away—that the only way the conversations on my digital recorder are going to get into a Word document is if I type them into one.
So I look at my hands, right, and my hands look back at me. I stare at my knuckles, my upturned, clammy palms, my genetically recessive bird wrists, and they’re all yelling, “We can do this! We can take it, bring it, we’ve been typing for years!” Alas, I cannot match their bravado. For while I was sitting in these meetings, listening to six men over seventy talk on top of one another about the Phoenix canal layout in 1947, my hands were busy spreading mayonnaise on a catered ham sandwich. And while I watched a ninety-three year old surgeon explain forty years of Maricopa County property maps, my right hand was busy frantically setting my cell phone to silent. My left hand, if you can believe it, was asleep.
So while my hands might be all pumped up and confident in their ability to tackle this, the transcription of SEVEN YEARS OF DIALOG, my brain knows otherwise. My brain knows the hands of this operation are much better suited to fishing for termites with broken stpcks.
The Little Ass Lady's Glass came from a bar on the ASU campus called the Timber Wolf. Timber Wolf was one of those bars that doubles as a dare; they had seventeen thousand beers on tap, and if you somehow managed to slog all the way through the suds roster, you were handsomely rewarded with a 3" by 5" personalized plaque on the ceiling. And probably divorce papers. The bar managed to look shockingly like a 1800s bayou fishing shanty and was, I maintain, constructed entirely out of balsa wood.
This pattern, I don't know what the actual name is; I might have known at one time but I call it so many other things under my breath that I've long since forgotten. I've harbored a soul crushing hatred for these dishes for many, many years. I can see how a person could look at the picture to the left and be confused: "But why?" that person might ask. "That's a perfectly respectable bowl, right there. A little fruit, a little color... some people don't even have dishes, my uncle in Des Moines, for example, his wife left him and he's been eating canned chili off an old car floormat for three years."
The set she gave me was the set she and my grandfather used everyday for thirty years and it's gorgeous. I've always loved it. It's Royal Worcester and very delicate, white and smooth, gold-rimmed. With fruits.
It seems as though I may have inadvertently gotten him addicted to gambling which could turn into a problem down the road, I guess, but I'll give him this, the kid's got pretty good instincts. And he didn't seem to like the cigars, so it's not all bad news.
And he accepted that pretty gracefully, I thought. He nodded, walking around and around the table, assessing, looking for a way. Mentally working out the physics. Calculating the odds of catastrophic mishap. He was pretty hilarious, up on his little thong sandal tippy toes, and I knelt down next to him to get a photo. At which point he attacked me like a howler monkey, scrambled up my body and sprung off the top of my head to achieve a mighty victory.